Word: american
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...American racial and ethnic groups on the way up, gaining control of city hall is confirmation of emerging political clout. So it was a triumphal moment last week when Manhattan Borough President David Dinkins defeated three-term incumbent Edward I. Koch to win the Democratic Party mayoral primary in New York City. Since Democrats outnumber Republicans 5 to 1, Dinkins became an instant choice to prevail over the Republican challenger, former U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani, and become the first black chief executive of the nation's largest city...
...Dinkins succeeds, New York would join the growing ranks of cities with black mayors. African Americans occupy just 1.5% of elective offices at the federal, state and local level, though they account for 11% of the voting-age population. But 22 years after the ground-breaking 1967 elections of Carl Stokes in Cleveland and Richard Hatcher in Gary, more than 300 American cities have black mayors, including 25 with populations over...
...black takeovers coincided with the deterioration of the economies of American cities, especially in the industrial areas to which many blacks had migrated from the South. Places like Cleveland and Detroit suffered a dwindling of the well-paid manufacturing jobs that had pulled generations of unskilled workers into the middle class. Many whites, fearing black government, fled to the suburbs, taking their taxable incomes with them. The financial bind worsened under the Reagan Administration's cutbacks in urban aid. "It's like getting the prize and seeing that the prize is hollow," says Linda Williams, policy analyst at the Joint...
Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1987) won every major American prize for nonfiction. Having written well on the most terrible weapon ever used in war, Rhodes evidently has decided to beat his words into plowshares...
...there is a message in all this for high school seniors and their parents nervously prepping for the college gauntlet, it is simply "Relax." To its credit, American higher education remains infinitely less hierarchical than that of Japan or France. In a nation of second chances, no college admissions office -- not even Harvard's -- has the power to either guarantee success or withhold...